Very few people have a complete, coherent system of terminal values. The few who do usually seem to suffer from their excessive rigidity. I can’t commit to an exhaustive set of goals, all the way to the end of my life. I’ve had to discard and change my plans too many times. What looks like a great idea today may turn out to be fruitless on inspection.
Instead of goals I think about resources. I don’t know specifically what I’m going to want to do, but whatever it is, money will be helpful. As will health. And human capital. And a track record of accomplishments.
When a goal isn’t a resource, it usually turns out to be a fake goal. “I want to learn Latin.” Well, if learning Latin isn’t going to help me with anything, then guess what? I’ll never get around to learning Latin. It’s just an empty aspiration. Learning awk, however, isn’t an empty aspiration—I learned the hard way how badly I need it. Awk is a resource.
It’s not a perfect distinction. Sometimes a resource looks like a mere aspiration because its usefulness is too far away in time. Asking “is this a resource?” will tend to bias you towards what you need most now. But it’s not a bad algorithm. (I think of it as gradient ascent.) You get done what you need to do, and you worry a lot less about what you vaguely think you should be doing.
I think “goals” are the wrong way to look at it.
Very few people have a complete, coherent system of terminal values. The few who do usually seem to suffer from their excessive rigidity. I can’t commit to an exhaustive set of goals, all the way to the end of my life. I’ve had to discard and change my plans too many times. What looks like a great idea today may turn out to be fruitless on inspection.
Instead of goals I think about resources. I don’t know specifically what I’m going to want to do, but whatever it is, money will be helpful. As will health. And human capital. And a track record of accomplishments.
When a goal isn’t a resource, it usually turns out to be a fake goal. “I want to learn Latin.” Well, if learning Latin isn’t going to help me with anything, then guess what? I’ll never get around to learning Latin. It’s just an empty aspiration. Learning awk, however, isn’t an empty aspiration—I learned the hard way how badly I need it. Awk is a resource.
It’s not a perfect distinction. Sometimes a resource looks like a mere aspiration because its usefulness is too far away in time. Asking “is this a resource?” will tend to bias you towards what you need most now. But it’s not a bad algorithm. (I think of it as gradient ascent.) You get done what you need to do, and you worry a lot less about what you vaguely think you should be doing.